Villaggio Coppola


Villaggio Coppola is a settlement in the Italian region of Campania, administratively a frazione of Castel Volturno. Housing U.S. military families for decades, it was the largest illegally built settlement in Italy. The builders were eventually found guilty of various crimes. The site is now a ghost town.

Construction

Villaggio Coppola is located along the Via Domiziana, beside the Tyrrhenian Sea between Castel Volturno and Naples. The settlement was built illegally in the 1960s by brothers Vincenzo and Cristoforo Coppola. They used cement suppliers connected to the Camorra and assembled the over half the village on public land which had previously been pine forest.

Ghost town

The site became home for thousands of U.S. military families until the 1990s, when Admiral Jeremy Michael Boorda declared the site unsafe and crime-ridden. By the 2010s, the 12,000 apartments were mostly empty or squatted and the village had become a ghost town. The Coppola brothers' plans to redevelop the site into a tourist harbour have stalled.
Part of the village was confiscated by the state in 1995, and in May 2000, the Coppola brothers were found guilty of constructing 5,000 buildings without permission, destroying 200 metres of coastlines and eradicating 150 species from the site. In the early 2000s, eight apartment blocks were demolished.